4. Status Updates in the Edwardian Book Inscription

“Arnold Sills born on 20th of April at 11:15pm”

“G.H. Newton is quite incompetent and grossly careless”

“I am going to Canada on June 8th”

“Today I (H.H. Williams) was given a pocket wallet by the members of the Bethel Men and Women’s Bible Class”

“Our beloved King George died 11.55pm”

With their immediacy, direct address and topics of births, holidays, social engagements and global events, you would be forgiven for thinking that the above statements were posted on Facebook. But, in fact, they were all written within the confines of books between 1901 and 1914. Conscious that their books would be shared amongst friends, families, acquaintances and even domestic staff in upper-middle and upper-class households with library collections, many owners used the blank spaces at the front of their books as opportunities to share news or private thoughts with others.

Status updates on social media often serve as opportunities for emotional disclosure, with users sharing personal events and emotions in order to gain intimacy and procure social support from others (Manago et al., 2012). However, many scholars have also found that status updates have an ‘exhibitionist’ quality, whereby users publish posts to seek gratification from others (Carpenter, 2012; Jung and Sundar, 2018). When exploring status updates in Edwardian book inscriptions, it is apparent that users’ motives tend to be far more complex and cannot be put down simply to narcissism or an inherent desire to be liked. Let’s break down the five examples above and tease out their varying purposes for each individual.

The first status update announcing the birth of Arnold Sills appeared in a copy of a history book on the Crimean War. The update was subsequently added to three years later with the line: “Baby boy born on 28th May at 6:15pm.” The book’s owner, and father of the two boys, was Frank Sills – a cotton weaver from Crompton, Lancashire. Cotton weaving was a tough job carried out in poor working conditions for little pay. With limited disposable income available, Frank was unable to pay for an advert in the local newspaper announcing the birth of his children. Consequently, knowing that his book would be shared amongst peers, he marked the endpapers with their time and date of birth to disseminate this news publicly. This innovative use of the book inscription shows how those with less cultural capital were able to develop their own meanings in order to pass information on informally to others in their social network.

The second status update serves as an Edwardian form of trolling, taking advantage of the book’s transition between the public and private sphere to criticise somebody else. It was created by Thomas Jeston White, a wholesaler who lived in Marylebone, London. The whole inscription explains that White employed “G.H. Newton of Uxbridge Road, Ealing Dean” to help him move to a new house, but his incompetence resulted in White’s personal belongings getting damaged. As owners felt that their books were a reflection of themselves, this explicit statement of blame acts as a face-saving attempt to protect White’s self-image. Anyone who borrowed the book would have realised that its poor condition was due to the incompetence and carelessness of Newton, not the owner. Here, the inscription has several functions. First, by providing Newton’s name and address, the owner is signaling to friends that he is not to be recommended and they should not use his services if they need help moving house. Second, it attacks Newton’s character in terms of work ethic and respectability – two traits that were considered essential for all Edwardians. This would have had a detrimental effect on the public’s perception of Newton, standing as a permanent testimony to his character flaws.

In the third status update, the owner boldly states that they are going to Canada on June 8th. When we see this type of post on social media, we might feel a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, we are glad for our friend who is taking a well-deserved break from work and going on holiday, but on the other, we feel a touch of jealousy and even frustration that they are ‘flaunting’ their good fortune to the world. Our contemporary knowledge may lead us to apply a similar logic to this Edwardian status update, but there is more to it than meets the eye. The inscription belonged to Alice Urie, a 7-year-old girl from Bethnal Green, London and daughter of a bootmaker. Alice’s family suffered from severe poverty and, in 1911, took advantage of a scheme offered by the Salvation Army to send young men from poor areas in London to Canada to work as agricultural labourers. On June 8th 1911, Alice and her family boarded a ship to Canada. Three months later, the family returned to Bethnal Green, leaving Alice’s older brothers Frederick and Albert in Canada with the hope of a new life. Viewed in this context, Alice’s status update gains additional meaning. Was she, as a poor working-class girl, excited about the prospect of visiting Canada and marked her book as an aide memoire? Was she sad or worried about leaving her two brothers behind and wrote in her book to record the momentous event? Or was she, in fact, ‘posturing’ to others in her local community by informing them that she was going abroad? Although we will never know the true meaning of this update for Alice, it clearly had a more multilayered and intricate message than we tend to grant modern-day status updates.

The fourth status update, in which the owner informs his peers that he has received a gift from members of his Bible class, is perhaps the one that bears most similarities to modern-day social media practices. The inscription was written by Hugh H. Williams, a slate quarryman from Llandygai, Wales. Quarry work was arduous and strongly associated with poverty, illness and premature death. Given Williams’ relatively low social status in real life, he may have been using his inscription to construct a positive image of himself in order to gain symbolic status from those around him. The use of “today” gives the inscription an emotional immediacy, suggesting that Williams wrote it shortly after the event took place, while the fact that “I” is followed by his full name foregrounds his identity. Today, this type of post would likely receive many messages of congratulations from followers; likewise, Williams would have expected to receive verbal compliments from those in his local community.

The final status update is one that we see often on social media: the announcement of a famous person’s death or significant event. In this case, the target audience is more unclear. When delivered as a factual statement, the update seems to serve as a diary entry for the owner who simply records the momentous occasion so as not to forget it (e.g. death of a monarch, outbreak of First World War, etc.). In other cases, however, these announcements include emotive statements or opinions, which seem to bear a greater resemblance to the way that Facebook or Twitter users engage with global events today: “King George V was a learner and a worker. He was friendly and forgiving. He will be sorely missed.” Psychologists call the relationship that non-celebrities have with celebrities as “parasocial” (Brown et al., 2003) because it is one-sided, yet can be experienced with a similar emotional strength to personal relationships. When a celebrity dies, social media practices are seen to shape and reshape our collective memory of the person’s life. They also help in the process of sense-making and provide legitimacy to this parasocial grief (Gach et al., 2017). The book inscriptions seem to share similar aims. However, some also see outpours of grief on social media as virtue signalling, personal attention seeking or even exploitation of a tragic event. This raises the question of whether book inscriptions can also be viewed in the same way, given that they too were created with an awareness that they would be shared with others.

So, even before social media, people were able to take advantage of the platforms available to them to provide status updates to others. Whether to announce a birth or a death, record a holiday or new job, criticise someone or publicise a global event, Edwardians used the blank spaces in their books, knowing that they would be shared with those around them. While, undoubtedly, some were concerned with creating a good impression and gaining cultural capital from those around them, many more used these inscriptions to make sense of their own lives, record memories and navigate their sociocultural landscapes. This was particularly important for members of the lower classes who lacked the wealth or status to command such attention in real life. Clearly, when it comes to Edwardian status updates, we should not judge the book by its cover. Perhaps we should reassess contemporary status updates in a similar light?

References:

Brown, W., Basil, M. and Bocarnea, M. 2003. Social Influence of an International Celebrity: Responses to the Death of Princess Diana, Journal of Communication 53(4), pp. 587-605.

Carpenter, C. 2012. Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior, Personality and Individual Differences 52(4), pp. 482-86.

Gach, K., Fiesler, C. and Brubaker, J. 2017. "Control your emotions, Potter:" An Analysis of Grief Policing on Facebook in Response to Celebrity Death, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3134682

Jung, E. and Sundar, S. 2018. Status update: Gratifications derived from Facebook affordances by older adults, New Media & Society 20(11), pp. 4135-54.

Manago, A., Taylor, T. and Greenfield, P. 2012. Me and My 400 Friends: The Anatomy of College Students' Facebook Networks, Their Communication Patterns, and Well-Being, Development Psychology 48(2), pp. 369-80.